A Martian Odyssey
"Laugh!" grumbled Jarvis. "I'd already had a nasty bump and a mean
frostbite on that nose. Anyway, I yelled 'Ouch!' and jumped aside and
the creature dashed away; but from then on, their greeting was 'We are
v-r-r-riends! Ouch!' Queer beasts!
"Tweel and I followed the road squarely up to the nearest mound. The
creatures were coming and going, paying us not the slightest attention,
fetching their loads of rubbish. The road simply dived into an opening,
and slanted down like an old mine, and in and out darted the
barrel-people, greeting us with their eternal phrase.
"I looked in; there was a light somewhere below, and I was curious to
see it. It didn't look like a flame or torch, you understand, but more
like a civilized light, and I thought that I might get some clue as to
the creatures' development. So in I went and Tweel tagged along, not
without a few trills and twitters, however.
"The light was curious; it sputtered and flared like an old arc light,
but came from a single black rod set in the wall of the corridor. It
was electric, beyond doubt. The creatures were fairly civilized,
apparently.
"Then I saw another light shining on something that glittered and I went
on to look at that, but it was only a heap of shiny sand. I turned
toward the entrance to leave, and the Devil take me if it wasn't gone!
"I suppose the corridor had curved, or I'd stepped into a side passage.
Anyway, I walked back in that direction I thought we'd come, and all I
saw was more dimlit corridor. The place was a labyrinth! There was
nothing but twisting passages running every way, lit by occasional
lights, and now and then a creature running by, sometimes with a
pushcart, sometimes without.
"Well, I wasn't much worried at first. Tweel and I had only come a few
steps from the entrance. But every move we made after that seemed to get
us in deeper. Finally I tried following one of the creatures with an
empty cart, thinking that he'd be going out for his rubbish, but he ran
around aimlessly, into one passage and out another. When he started
dashing around a pillar like one of these Japanese waltzing mice, I gave
up, dumped my water tank on the floor, and sat down.
"Tweel was as lost as I. I pointed up and he said 'No--no--no!' in a
sort of helpless trill. And we couldn't get any help from the natives.
They paid no attention at all, except to assure us they were
friends--ouch!
"Lord! I don't know how many hours or days we wandered around there! I
slept twice from sheer exhaustion; Tweel never seemed to need sleep. We
tried following only the upward corridors, but they'd run uphill a ways
and then curve downwards. The temperature in that damned ant hill was
constant; you couldn't tell night from day and after my first sleep I
didn't know whether I'd slept one hour or thirteen, so I couldn't tell
from my watch whether it was midnight or noon.
"We saw plenty of strange things. There were machines running in some of
the corridors, but they didn't seem to be doing anything--just wheels
turning. And several times I saw two barrel-beasts with a little one
growing between them, joined to both."
"Parthenogenesis!" exulted Leroy. "Parthenogenesis by budding like _les
tulipes_!"
"If you say so, Frenchy," agreed Jarvis. "The things never noticed us at
all, except, as I say, to greet us with 'We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!'
They seemed to have no home-life of any sort, but just scurried around
with their pushcarts, bringing in rubbish. And finally I discovered what
they did with it.
"We'd had a little luck with a corridor, one that slanted upwards for a
great distance. I was feeling that we ought to be close to the surface
when suddenly the passage debouched into a domed chamber, the only one
we'd seen. And man!--I felt like dancing when I saw what looked like
daylight through a crevice in the roof.
"There was a--a sort of machine in the chamber, just an enormous wheel
that turned slowly, and one of the creatures was in the act of dumping
his rubbish below it. The wheel ground it with a crunch--sand, stones,
plants, all into powder that sifted away somewhere. While we watched,
others filed in, repeating the process, and that seemed to be all. No
rhyme nor reason to the whole thing--but that's characteristic of this
crazy planet. And there was another fact that's almost too bizarre to
believe.
"One of the creatures, having dumped his load, pushed his cart aside
with a crash and calmly shoved himself under the wheel! I watched him
being crushed, too stupefied to make a sound, and a moment later,
another followed him! They were perfectly methodical about it, too; one
of the cartless creatures took the abandoned pushcart.
"Tweel didn't seem surprised; I pointed out the next suicide to him, and
he just gave the most human-like shrug imaginable, as much as to say,
'What can I do about it?' He must have known more or less about these
creatures.
"Then I saw something else. There was something beyond the wheel,
something shining on a sort of low pedestal. I walked over; there was a
little crystal about the size of an egg, fluorescing to beat Tophet. The
light from it stung my hands and face, almost like a static discharge,
and then I noticed another funny thing. Remember that wart I had on my
left thumb? Look!" Jarvis extended his hand. "It dried up and fell
off--just like that! And my abused nose--say, the pain went out of it
like magic! The thing had the property of hard x-rays or gamma
radiations, only more so; it destroyed diseased tissue and left healthy
tissue unharmed!
"I was thinking what a present _that'd_ be to take back to Mother Earth
when a lot of racket interrupted. We dashed back to the other side of
the wheel in time to see one of the pushcarts ground up. Some suicide
had been careless, it seems.
"Then suddenly the creatures were booming and drumming all around us and
their noise was decidedly menacing. A crowd of them advanced toward us;
we backed out of what I thought was the passage we'd entered by, and
they came rumbling after us, some pushing carts and some not. Crazy
brutes! There was a whole chorus of 'We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!' I
didn't like the 'ouch'; it was rather suggestive.
"Tweel had his glass gun out and I dumped my water tank for greater
freedom and got mine. We backed up the corridor with the barrel-beasts
following--about twenty of them. Queer thing--the ones coming in with
loaded carts moved past us inches away without a sign.
"Tweel must have noticed that. Suddenly, he snatched out that glowing
coal cigar-lighter of his and touched a cart-load of plant limbs. Puff!
The whole load was burning--and the crazy beast pushing it went right
along without a change of pace! It created some disturbance among our
'V-r-r-riends,' however--and then I noticed the smoke eddying and
swirling past us, and sure enough, there was the entrance!
"I grabbed Tweel and out we dashed and after us our twenty pursuers. The
daylight felt like Heaven, though I saw at first glance that the sun was
all but set, and that was bad, since I couldn't live outside my
thermo-skin bag in a Martian night--at least, without a fire.
"And things got worse in a hurry. They cornered us in an angle between
two mounds, and there we stood. I hadn't fired nor had Tweel; there
wasn't any use in irritating the brutes. They stopped a little distance
away and began their booming about friendship and ouches.
"Then things got still worse! A barrel-brute came out with a pushcart
and they all grabbed into it and came out with handfuls of foot-long
copper darts--sharp-looking ones--and all of a sudden one sailed past my
ear--zing! And it was shoot or die then.
"We were doing pretty well for a while. We picked off the ones next to
the pushcart and managed to keep the darts at a minimum, but suddenly
there was a thunderous booming of 'v-r-r-riends' and 'ouches,' and a
whole army of 'em came out of their hole.
"Man! We were through and I knew it! Then I realized that Tweel wasn't.
He could have leaped the mound behind us as easily as not. He was
staying for me!
"Say, I could have cried if there'd been time! I'd liked Tweel from the
first, but whether I'd have had gratitude to do what he was
doing--suppose I _had_ saved him from the first dream-beast--he'd done
as much for me, hadn't he? I grabbed his arm, and said 'Tweel,' and
pointed up, and he understood. He said, 'No--no--no, Tick!' and popped
away with his glass pistol.
"What could I do? I'd be a goner anyway when the sun set, but I couldn't
explain that to him. I said, 'Thanks, Tweel. You're a man!' and felt
that I wasn't paying him any compliment at all. A man! There are mighty
few men who'd do that.
"So I went 'bang' with my gun and Tweel went 'puff' with his, and the
barrels were throwing darts and getting ready to rush us, and booming
about being friends. I had given up hope. Then suddenly an angel dropped
right down from Heaven in the shape of Putz, with his under-jets
blasting the barrels into very small pieces!
"Wow! I let out a yell and dashed for the rocket; Putz opened the door
and in I went, laughing and crying and shouting! It was a moment or so
before I remembered Tweel; I looked around in time to see him rising in
one of his nosedives over the mound and away.
"I had a devil of a job arguing Putz into following! By the time we got
the rocket aloft, darkness was down; you know how it comes here--like
turning off a light. We sailed out over the desert and put down once or
twice. I yelled 'Tweel!' and yelled it a hundred times, I guess. We
couldn't find him; he could travel like the wind and all I got--or else
I imagined it--was a faint trilling and twittering drifting out of the
south. He'd gone, and damn it! I wish--I wish he hadn't!"
The four men of the _Ares_ were silent--even the sardonic Harrison. At
last little Leroy broke the stillness.
"I should like to see," he murmured.
"Yeah," said Harrison. "And the wart-cure. Too bad you missed that; it
might be the cancer cure they've been hunting for a century and a half."
"Oh, that!" muttered Jarvis gloomily. "That's what started the fight!"
He drew a glistening object from his pocket.
"Here it is."